Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Crusader Strike Syndrome II

Looks like Retribution got nerfed again. Divine Storm now does Physical damage (and is affected by armor) instead of Holy.

I sense a pattern here. In 2.0, the top Ret talent was released. People screamed that Ret was overpowered, and Ret got nerfed. Then Blizzard had to reverse the nerf months later. In 3.0, the top Ret talent was released. People screamed that Ret was overpowered, and Ret got nerfed. Will Blizzard have to reverse this change too?

Kind of honestly, this does not reflect well on Blizzard's testing practices at all. DS has been Holy pretty much throughout Beta and Ptr, yet it needs to get *hotfixed* within 24 hours of going live? This seems like an overreaction. As well, this patch is full of bugs when it comes to paladin mechanics. Maybe Blizzard should actually fix some of the bugs affecting the class before nerfing it.

I stand by my statement that instant attacks proccing Seals was a bad idea. It widens the gap between Ret (2 instants) and Prot (1 instant) and Holy (0 instants). It causes us to have watered down instant attacks, because attached Seal damage has to be considered. It increases our extreme potential burst unnecessarily, due to Seal of Command.

28 comments:

Has anyone got to play with this yet to see how it actually affects DPS? That change doesn't even make sense though. It is a spell. Spells deal damage from a specific school of magic, in our case, Holy. It would be like making a Mage Fireball deal physical damage. It doesn't make sense. Unless we are going to start being able to quad wield yellow hammers this is dumb.

However, I would not be upset if this becomes a physical ability like CS if that means that we can use it while silenced. I believe CS can be used while silenced because it is a physical attack. Guess we will have to see how it pans out.

I think that the release of Warhammer has scared Blizzard into a releasing an expansion that is basically not ready.

My pala is only level 65 (I got bored of the auto-attaching mechanics that is pre-Wrath Pala, sad to say), on the PTR specced to ret and went around soloing with a one-hander and shield and put out about as much dps as my fire-mage of the same level on live... I.e. Ret was blatently imba.

So I don't think that Blizzard have bad testing - I think that Wrath basically just isn't ready yet and was forced out for commercial reasons i.e. this patch appears near the end of Warhammer's first free month.

Adjunct to this, I wonder if Blizzard's 'It's ready when it's ready' philosphy can work with MMO's? A bad expansion can kill a game, true - but so can rolling out new expansions with too big a gap between them i.e. the playerbase was more or less ready for Wrath in June/July so I think that Blizzard have to try much harder to meet their 18 month goal for new xpac rollouts.

To be honest, though, and was stated numerous times, they could test until they're blue in the face but the percentage of people testing is vastly outnumbered by the total number of players.

The internal testers and the beta testers are (mainly) very bright and motivated people, but they're still probably less then 1% of the total player-base. They're without a doubt going to miss some things or some combinations of effects.

As well, take note that while BGs and world PvP were still active on the beta, arenas didn't really get going until very recently. And about the same time they had a stat stacking bug that was blowing a lot of results out of proportion. These combined mean that there was very little PvP testing throughout the entire beta, and what little there was was tainted because of the stat bug.

ret is way over powered right now. 2 global cooldowns to kill people with 400 res and top dps in PvE (Brut) with same spec. It is kinda stupid they let ret go live like it is. They even bring more utility to the raid than they used to (+2% raid damage + mana regen for 10 people).

It does make you wonder how they do testing. It always surprises me that they don't seems to just put the numbers from the formulas they create into excel like everyone on elitest jerks does.

We'll be nerfed because of the impact for the two weeks this will be played at 70, and wait for 10 months at 80 to get balanced again. Its a shame, Blizzard just needs to say "Hey, this is going to be a bit wonky for a couple weeks. As people level, it really is balanced."

Or, if they really have a problem, how about lowering the number of extra attacks at lower levels, add them as the player levels with additional ranks.

At 70, you get two swings. 74 gets three. 78 gets 4. 80 gets 5 swings. So much more balanced than chopping the ability at the knees.

And, yes, there are people who say "Try it, its not so bad" and I can tell them they are wrong before we even start. The reason is simple... change to physical means that Paladins will now favor armor penatration as a stat over all others. This was intended to be a change in mechanic, to remove one of the stats for us, to be less dependant on so many. Sorry, this change either forgets that important mechanic change or ignores it. Either way, this is poorly handled.

Hotfix or no, nerfed or no - DPS is WAY up. Period. Everyone wanted to "test drive" their new spells and talents last night, so we made an impromptu Karazhan group and annihilated the entirety of the instance in just over two hours (no CC used on Moroes - just burned them all down, one repentence on Maiden, one evocation on Curator, one arcane explosion on Shade, one set of beams on Netherspite - to illustrate the ease). It would have been shorter, but we let our sense of invincibility cause a couple dumb wipes on trash, and a wipe on Shade with people stuck outside the room.

I was near 1k DPS for most of the run (about a 50% increase from what I'm accustomed to seeing), finishing around 925 for the night and #2 on the meter (behind a WELL-geared fury warrior). Was still sporting Ragesteel Shoulders and Skullsplitter gauntlets (remarkably decent BoE blues if you're not hit-capped), as well as only one DPS trinket (Hourglass acquired from BM just prior to Karazhan run).

I died a little too often (WTB shorter CD on Hand of Salvation), but everyone was thoroughly impressed with not only the damage output, but with the healing and mana provided by Divine Storm and Judgements of the Wise, respectively. I wanted to position myself as the (and demonstrate the need to have a) indispensible ret paladin for raids - and I think I succeeded.

I shudder to think what the numbers could have been without the nerf (of which I was not even aware).

NOTE: It occurred to me mid-raid that without Precision in the Prot tree, the hit cap is 142 now, not the previous 95 for human paladins. Fortunately, I acquired the DPS ring from Prince with 17 hit, and got enough badges to purchase the DPS badge gloves (Doomgrip Gauntlets?) for another +13 net hit gain. Two Glinting Noble Topaz later (one in new gloves, one in another existing piece) I've already nearly covered the gap - Surefooted on the boots will get me to 143 tonight.

Between the night before just running around randomly killing things, and last night - there was nothing that made me go "WTF is wrong with my DPS", especially after 9 aggro-ripping-induced deaths. L2watchOmenBetter XD

I'm a protection paladin, level 69.Last night we had a team of: spriest, prot pally, balanced druid, resto shaman and then either a fire mage or an enhancement shaman or a MM hunter.

We cleared:HEROIC Slave Pens - in 32 minutesHEROIC Underbog - I think this was about 45 to 50 minutesregular Steamvaultsregular Black Morass - no more than 2 groups of adds ever spawned from each portal, most of the time just 1 addHEROIC Black Morass - I can't believe I could tank this at level 69 and that my girlfriend could heal it at 69.

I believe we wiped twice throughout the entire night, and both times was the hunter accidentally body pulling or doing stupid things like MDing to me when the healer was afk.

My dps, at level 69, with some greens and blues... on the order of 500 to 550.I beat the shadow priest in every instance except for one when it came to overall damage.

The moonkin used to be spec'd dreamstate/NS and do roughly 400 dps... last night he was full balanced and did over 900 dps.

I'm not sure what to make of all the changes, but I wouldn't be surprised if T5-level guilds start getting ballsy and attempting Sunwell.

We raided sunwell last night. We had first 3 on farm and a couple almost kills on twins. We 1 shot first 4 (server first twins kill). Took 4-5 attempts on M'Uru and got a kill. The ret paladin in the raid was around +1000 dps from normal and said he didn't have a good rotation down yet. He did 2600 dps on brut (4:30 kill down from 5:40 a previous best). Ret was top dps on brut and felmyst and twins.

Ret will be nerfed a lot. No way a utility class should be topping dps meter. Enjoy it while it lasts.

So yeah, if they're going to nerf us, how about giving us more survivability? Right now us paladins seem like we're in cloth rather than plate and I pop like popcorn in BGs. Talk about a glass cannon. As soon as you get in range of anything "You Have Died." comes to mind. If you do get the upper hand, then yes you have a chance to throw down amazing numbers. People just don't get it. High AP + Low Survivability = balanced. MS warriors = High AP + Better survivability. We have stuns for a reason folks, and thats to survive in 1v1 battles. an arms warrior before the patch = unstoppable by any melee class, at least i found that out who knows how many times on my rogue when i couldnt get a stun off on a warrior b/c they resisted or they stunlocked me. Blizzard listens to all the whiny little people who used to train us and own us all day long because they cant do it anymore. Thats right, paladins are a capable opponent! We lived for so long learning our class mechanics and being able to play them with high skill just to survive. Now that we get buffed and we know what the F**K we're doing, they want to take it away little by little. How about looking at how the Rets play for once and determine if they're just playing with skill or if the class is seriously that wigged out. I tried 1v1's and i still lost here and there, esp to discipline priests >_<.

Zebra, I actually read your post when I was trying to find out what "nerfs" they were going to slap against our foreheads today. Sounds like a bandaid to help soothe the wounds of the whining children who are angry that they didnt roll a paladin. I've gone through every nerf and buff that blizzard has thrown at us since the beginning of WoW. It's amazing that the same story is told over and over again though. LUCKILY, we have Ghostcrawler on our side for this one. He has been standing up for the buff for Retribution paladins because they have been VERY lackluster and underpowered since the beginning. I've seen the way he's been handling the QQ from everyone so far and he's been nothing more than eloquent in his responses. He's trying to accomodate for the masses by showing these debuffs for us, but he's really striving to keep the class even with every other class. Noone has truly looked into how "OP" other classes are yet, namely BM Hunters with pet talent trees, Resto druids, Arms Warriors (In PVP), Fury Warriors (<< We were even with them with our buff in 3.0.2 before the debuff), Discipline priests (stand there and laugh at you while you try and do damage to them, they're basically warlocks now with huge healing bonuses), Enhancement shamans ( HUUUUGE DPS buff in the patch, its not even right), Elemental Shaman ability to slam people into space :P, Not to mention the other caster classes that have always dominated the dps charts by a margin of about 2-300 dps. Why don't we all QQ about everyone else? Maybe because we know we're now even matches for people in a 1v1. We lack the survivability that an MS warrior has, which is why we're given a bubble, Repentance and HoJ. We can use these to our advantage so we can stun, quick get a heal off and continue the fight.

The little kiddies will never learn to stop complaining until they get smacked in the face with a LOLNerfedHammer. The current state of all classes = OP. All other classes = learn to deal with it.

The big deal with Ret right now is the sudden burst damage, and large heals. My ret paladin is hitting heals on my with my holy pally prior to the patch.....but I have a much better crit rate with heals now ;P.

I have five 70's and the paladin is doing really well, but they aren't "OP SO MUCH OMG" that they need a freakin hot fix for them. My arcane mage is doing well more damage then my Retadin.....mage just doesn't have the instant 2k FOL crit. My rogue destorys anyone with shadow dance, but only once every two minutes. My lock and druid I havn't tried out yet, but I'm sure the druid will be rockin.

"Half of these post are great examples of why pallys are looked at as the biggest QQ babies.

~ Jason, DPS Liberation Front"

I think it's more an example of how the other classes can't deal with the fact that ret pallys are actual competitors, and they can't just mash a button to beat one anymore. It's their crying that brought about the nerfs to begin with. Go troll somewhere else.

If a plate wearing melee class dealing spell dmg based on weapon dmg and melee stats is imbalanced wait till the babies get stomped by Death Knights.

The change to physical dmg hurts us most against warriors, paladins, resto druids, resto shamans. This hurts us raid too because bosses will still have armor and lower DS dmg equalls lower raid healing from DS.

I can deal with being lower dmg then a dps class in raid since I provide a steady stream of mana and health to every one.

Turning my crit modifiers into all dmg modifiers and a dot when you crit ability is dumb. All direct dmg crit dmg specs have crit dmg modifiers. The dot is bad, going to hurt group play pvp with a doted target not going to be as controlable.

The change to repentence is dumb. Repentence is use by paladins in the same way rogues use blind.

Ret paladins are still getting demolished by good rogues and ranged classes that can kite.

Ret paladin vs Arms warrior

ret hits arms with DS for 100, ret gets healed for 20(or 10 if mortal strike is up) this is how is with holy dmg DS

ret hits arms with ds for 50, ret is healed for 12 (6 is mortal striked) this is how it is with physical dmg DS

With the reduction to Judgements of Light and Wisdom by 50%, and the nerfage to DS, I really don't see a reason to stay Ret. Prot is actually more viable now.

What really pisses me off is that folks QQ and we are nerfed via hotfixes, while the things that are promised to us to compensate will come "in the future" Yeah, fat F*ing chance. We'll see that shit in patch 3.6.

You have to realize that there is another hidden nerf here. With changing DS to physical damage, it also looses any benefit from anything that boosts Holy damage. So there is a greater nerf here.

As soon as I can gather more prot gear, it's back to prot for me. Screw ret.

Karl, if this is going to be a big problem, POST ON THE FORUMS ABOUT IT. If you read GhostCrawler's Blue post, he said if these nerfs are going to be a big detriment to a ret's dps and survivability (in comparison to other classes), make a fuss about it! He wants us to tell him if this is hurting the class substantially and they will remedy the situation that will benefit everyone.

"RJ said: The internal testers and the beta testers are (mainly) very bright and motivated people, but they're still probably less then 1% of the total player-base."

Please keep in mind, bright and motivated people are not going to cry about a rebalancing. The people I've heard QQing the most are people that I couldn't destroy before. Ret paladins have always been deadly to s stunned opponent. Most people can't stand paladins doing decent damage for once.

I hope for Blizzards sake they don't touch this class at all. They took away my mana efficency and respectable healing (I played a secondary healer for 3 years I've come to terms with playing back up)

Yes they buffed us as prot so we are closer to Main Tank worthy but now we "are on par with a protection warrior" except that prot warriors got a buff in damage, and now they have a respectable AOE for tanking and removed the mob limit on thunderclap.

So let me have a turn at being OP for a time. Before it was spam bolt warlocks, no one cried nerf the locks! Druids have been unbelieveably broken in PVP since BC dropped, Everyone but druid cried out for those nerfs, they never came. If you have a problem with a little pally love FINALLY coming down the path for us, talk to my axe.